Screenwriter »

• Gotcha! The News of the World bites the dust.

  July 7, 2011 @ 9:42 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Yes, I know, I know. “Gotcha” was actually a Sun headline.  But it does seem enormously appropriate in this case. As you will be aware, James Murdoch, a close relative of The Lord of the Flies, has announced that, following revelations about phone tapping, The News of the World is to close. It’s not often you turn on Sky News and are forced to clean your glasses upon glancing the main headline. For once, it is fair to say that nobody saw this coming. Actually, it’s a double shocker. The notion that The News of the World could be axed and that Rebekah Brooks, editor when the offenses took place, could still retain her position in News International — subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation —  is quite astonishing. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Put it this way. If any government minister was revealed to have been in charge when comparable outrages were happening in his or her department, the august individual would have been immediately forced to resign. Right?

  Look. Many of us have (let’s put it gently) always had reservations about the ethics and tone of The News of the World — its objectification of women in particular — but that paper has been an unavoidable part of the British cultural landscape for a century and a half. Many respectable individuals, otherwise seen with The Telegraph or The Guardian, bought the paper each Sunday “for the sport”. George Orwell’s great 1946 essay The Decline of the English Murder begins with this delicious paragraph:

  “It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?”

  Murder, of course. Orwell’s essay touches on the hypocrisy that drives much tabloid journalism: disgust at contemporary enormities coupled with a relishing of the grisliest details. But he clearly has some admiration for the skill with which the hacks go about their business. However much you may loathe the paper’s taste for sleaze, you can’t deny that a mighty institution has just crumbled.

  Even those who are happy to dance on the paper’s grave should have some reservations about the manner of its execution. Within seconds of the news emerging, commentators were speculating about the imminent arrival of a Sunday version of The Sun. It seems that News International — there being a Sunday Sun in Newcastle — had, earlier this week, registered the title The Sun on Sunday (if any journalist had spotted that nugget he or she would have landed scoop if the year). James Murdoch, speaking to Sky News tonight, didn’t exactly deny the notion. He offered some waffle about no such decisions being made at this point. (In an aside, the Sky reporting seemed pretty balanced to me. That associate of Murdoch’s News Corporation was happy enough to drag out any number of Rupert haters.)

  Blah, blah, blah! You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to detect a frightening degree of cynicism here. If the ploy works, Murdoch will cleanse News Corporation of its recent taints and nudge aside objections to News Corporation buying out B Sky B in total. Meanwhile, a more economic Sunday paper can be edged slyly into the weekend market.

  All very nice for those News of the World journalists who, some years after the offenses took place, have been flung out into the unforgiving, brutalist streets of Wapping.  By all means celebrate the fact that certain unlovely tabloid noises will not be heard in quite the same form again. But acknowledge that something squalid has just happened.

  Enjoy the following…

  

• Farewell to the desert boot man.

  July 4, 2011 @ 10:25 pm | by Donald Clarke

  News has just reached us that the creator of the world’s greatest shoe has died. You can take your brogues, sneakers, sandals and gumboots. As far as this writer is concerned, the most magnificent of all shoes remains the classic suede desert boot. Nathan Clark, great-grandson of Clark’s Shoes’ founder, actually died on June 23rd, but The Guardian only got around to running his obituary today. The piece explains that, contrary to popular belief, they were not exactly worn by the Eighth Army in the desert campaign. It seems that South African soldiers had them run up in Cairo to replace a class of voortrekker boot.

  

  The author’s feet, yesterday.

  At any rate, shortly after Mr Clark invented the fine garment in 1947, they began their erratic journey from lounge-lizard wear to beatnik accessory to Aldermaston-march essential and so on. They are very rarely entirely in fashion — the awful Britpop boom was one exception — but they are never completely out of fashion either. A fantastically comfortable shoe that is simple to lace-up (even when drunk) and stylish with every class of trouser, the desert boot is a friend that will never let you down. If you fancy smoking a French cigarette while reading T S Eliot and listening to Charles Mingus then this is the ideal footwear. Indeed, alongside Coleman’s Mustard, Tabasco Sauce and Marmite, they are one of the few products without which life would not be worth living.

  Happy to relate, the late Mr Clark (no suburban “e” for him) remained a fan of his own excellent creation throughout his long life. ”I wear the shoes myself and never doubted they were going to be a winner,” he said. I would wear them to the Galway Film Fleadh tomorrow in tribute, but I think it’s going to rain. Never mind. A version in leather is available.

• The worst thing about the economic landslide…

  November 23, 2010 @ 10:23 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Well, the worst thing about the economic landslide is the fact that thousands of people will lose their jobs, fail to make their house payments, feel the need to emigrate and generally experience all kinds of ordinary and extraordinary misery. Let me start again. One aspect of the current catastrophe that bugs me is the inevitable smugness that will spread through significant sections of the Northern Irish Unionist community. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But more than a few men in blazers will be sitting down to a huge plate of told-you-so pie.

  

  A typical southerner yesterday.

  I know whereof I speak. A child of that community, I have, over the last decade or so, encountered more than a few golf club members who, after a small bucket of gin, would delight in telling you that the Republic’s economic boom was sure to end in disaster. The  general explanation for the economic surge was — these folk argued — to be found in the fact that every penny sitting in every Irish bank account came from “the Common Market”. It seems that, each weekend, European officials would travel over from Brussels and drive around the country handing out fivers to every gap-toothed yokel (that’s to say every citizen of the State) in every poorly maintained, rat-invested hovel (that’s to say every house outside the six counties). Being simple folk — children really — the Southerners would then spend the cash on magic beans, pinwheel hats and rosary beads. Eventually, the European money would run out and they (you) would all have to go back to eating rotten potatoes and having too many children.

  You may as well argue against the tide as point out that aspects other than EU largesse were at play: the highly educated population, an outward-looking attitude, a convenient location and, of course, that fabled, controversially low corporation tax. The slack-jawed baboons who lived south of Newry (or in Newry for that matter) could not, in any way, be considered responsible for the supernatural degrees of wealth circulating about the 26 counties.

  It was equally pointless to explain that Northern Ireland is just about the most subsidised corner of western Europe. A report I’ve just made up explains that, as of last December, some 98 percent of the Northern population works for the government in some capacity. No, no, no! It’s pure toil, harsh soap and Presbyterian thriftiness that turned Northern Ireland into the economic powerhouse it plainly isn’t.

  So, where are we now? It would be wrong to suggest that Rosemary and Edwin McCausland were correct in their assertion that the southerners’ inherent uselessness and unstoppable profligacy would bring their nation to a sticky end. Whatever the members of Ballyduckle Golf Club may believe, this is not a nation of village idiots and trained monkeys. Still, the awareness that quite a few Nordies are now laughing over their Scotches does chill the blood slightly.

• I like sneering facetiously at well-meaning posters. Do you?

  October 8, 2010 @ 9:29 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Okay, let’s get the preliminaries out of the way first. I delight in the changes that immigration has brought to Irish society.  Ireland of the 1980s looks ever more like a monocultural backwater when set beside the diverse country it is today. I think that any effort — however feeble — to make slope-headed racists more accepting of those changes is worthy of approval. If you’re looking for an old school, card-carrying champion of liberal pluralism then I am your only man. “Immigration problem” you say, Mr Taxi-Driver? In my mind the only problem is that there isn’t nearly enough immigration.

  So why does this current One City anti-racism campaign fill me with such undiluted fury? You know the ones. “I think the Dublin Bike Scheme is a great idea. Do you?” a North African lady asks. “I swim the Fortyfoot every Christmas. Do you?” another person of colour remarks. Bleurgh!

  I suppose it’s partly the fact that I resent being talked down to in such a fashion. To suggest that I don’t think an African lady would be interested in doing the Liffey Swim is to call me a moron. It’s also the psychotic jolliness of the images. If somebody of any colour approached me and began babbling about the National Basketball Arena — as one poster does — then I would immediately call for the white-coated men with the butterfly nets. Moreover, the stuff they are interested in is so dull — swimming, feeding ducks, basketball — that I find myself actually turning against the blameless subjects. Yes, I guess people of all colours are capable of being grinning bores. But it’s not quite the best line to take in an anti-racism campaign.

  Can I be alone? Am I the only misanthrope who groans at the sight of these things?

  Frankly, I’d go for a less cozy approach. I suggest three-sheet posters with the legend RACISTS ARE %&*£S! plastered across the centre. It would do about as much good as the One City Campaign, but it would raise my spirits whenever I glimpsed it.

• Does “proper English” matter?

  August 22, 2010 @ 9:49 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  In a recent post, I made a few passing smart-Alec remarks about The Irish Times Stylebook’s assertion that lady thespians should be referred to as “female actors” rather than “actresses”. Quite a few readers ignored the main thrust of the post and laid into this dictum with uninhibited gusto. The odd comment supported the stylebook’s strategy, but the consensus was that this was Political Correctness Gone Mad. It reminds us of those straight bananas the EU is always forcing us to eat. It recalls all those South London borough councils that banned the singing of Baa Baa Blacksheep.

  Other correspondents decided to pick up on further eccentricities within the paper’s linguistic rule book. What’s with this business of “media” being treated as singular noun? And so forth.

  A certain degree of consistency is desirable when editing a newspaper. It is, thus, a good idea to have a few rules in place. What, however, of the world beyond Tara Street? Perhaps all we should ask of writers is that they be clear and unambiguous in their prose. After all, the English language — even in its most formal incarnations — is awash with words that were once part of the vulgar vernacular. The rules on what is right and what is wrong change from decade  to decade. Does it matter if the proverbial grocer includes an unnecessary apostrophe when notifying us of his wares? Let’s be honest. When you read “potato’s”, you don’t really think that some tuber is in possession of an unidentified entity (though, if you were writing in to The Irish Times’ “letters page”, you would, almost certainly, pretend otherwise.)

  This is certainly the view of Mr Stephen Fry. You’d expect Viscount Stephen to be pernickety about such things, but in a recent podcast he claimed that he cared not a whit about the vegetable seller and his wandering punctuation point.

  More surprising still, Kingsley Amis, an unforgiving sort of conservative in later years, was reasonably easygoing about certain supposedly unshakable rules relating to grammar and syntax. He was prepared, for example, to happily forgive the use of split infinitives. (Do you see what I did there? Ho, ho!) He did not object to “however” appearing at the start of a sentence.  He even allowed that, in all but the most formal prose, editors need not insist on “whom” as the object of a sentence. He has a point. If some lesser person dares to growl at you in a disrespectful fashion, you will seem like a buffoon if you retort: ”To whom do you think you’re talking?” (In this example we are also, you will note, working hard at drawing the preposition away from the end of the sentence — yet another regulation that Sir Kingsley felt no need to enforce.)

  Amis’s observations on usage appear in a superb book entitled (rather awkwardly) The King’s English. Somewhere in the opening passages, he explains that, when considering the use of English, most people break its speakers down into two classes: Berks and Wankers. The imagined citizen defines these categories thus:

  “Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

  “Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them, the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.”

  Amis’s point, I suppose, is that we should strike a happy medium between respecting the language and being a priggish oaf. Good advice, you’d have to agree. Then again, there are certain “misuses” of English that, notwithstanding Mr Fry’s pleading, drive me to fits of blinding, spitting rage. When a writer wonders at the “enormity” of the universe, I know, of course, that he means its hugeness rather than its monstrous wickedness, but I still find the maltreated word an affront to all that’s decent. The most annoying blunder of all, however — more annoying even than “disinterest” for “lack of concern”, a usage that is fast becoming acceptable — is surely the use of “cliché” as an adjective. Where the hell did this come from?  A matter of minutes ago, everyone seemed to know that this word was a noun and they treated it accordingly. Now, you can’t access a comment board without reading something like “This movie is really cliché.” Is it? Is it really? Is it also really comedy and really biopic?

  Well, at least, I can relax safe in the knowledge that no usage guide will, in the next decade at least, accept this particular linguistic atrocity. Hang on, somebody has just pointed me to a recent online entry in Webster’s Dictionary. Lurking at the bottom of the page, we find the following horrid addition: “cliche: adjective“.

  Oh, what’s the bloody point?

• Farewell to the inventor of the PC.

  April 27, 2010 @ 4:15 pm | by Donald Clarke

   

  Ed Roberts, one of many people who could reasonably claim to have invented the PC, died at the start of the month, but news has only just reached Screenwriter Towers. Thirty-five years ago he marketed a kit for a crude machine called the Altair 8800. It didn’t really do anything worth doing, but it turned out to be the first commercially successful PC and, as well as offering Bill Gates his launchpad, ultimately allowed you (dear reader) to enjoy the phenomenon that is Screenwriter. If you want to more know about this unheralded hero, have a glance at Bob Cringley’s excellent (if inevitably dated) 1996 series on the rise of the personal computer, Triumph of the Nerds. There is terrifying stuff here about the accidental nature of Microsoft’s ultimate triumph.

  

• Gore Vidal can’t stand John Updike.

  February 16, 2010 @ 11:57 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Excuse us another jaunt off-topic, but I have to recommend Mark Lawson’s new radio series on post-war American writers. It’s on BBC Radio 4 and it’s called — you’ve guessed it — Capturing America: Mark Lawson’s History of American Literature. You have, at time of writing, a day to listen again to the first episode. Check out Gore Vidal on John Updike at about 25:10. “I can’t stand him.” Then listen to Tom Wolfe on John Irving and vice versa. On that last dispute, I do remember John Irving giving out about Tom Wolfe not being a serious writer and finding myself staring incredulously at the page. John Irving? It was as if Tom Clancy had decided to set himself up as a model of the highbrow intellectual. Anyway, enjoy…

  

  “I can’t quite make out who it is, but I’m pretty sure I hate him.”

• But not for viewers in Northern Ireland.

  December 21, 2009 @ 11:09 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Armando Iannucci used to do an excellent routine in which — remembering his childhood — he’d impersonate a BBC continuity announcer detailing the array of delights set to be broadcast that evening. I can’t remember the exact details, but I think he described unseen episodes of Star Trek featuring John Coltrane interspersed with in-depth interviews between Fidel Castro and James Dean. That sort of thing. Then, after raising expectations to breaking point, the imaginary announcer would say: “But not for viewers in Scotland”. A trailer  featuring Andy Stewart bawling at a frolicking haggis would then manifest itself before the young Armando.

  

  “Alex Maskey! Do you get it? Do you?”

  He had it lucky. Most readers will now have access to several hundred channels on their televisions. Who cares if the stunningly unfunny May McFetridge is occupying the space that BBC London (say) has allocated to Noam Chomsky? You can always switch to BBC 4 or Sky Movies or the ferret-stuffing channel. A few older, more Northern punters may, however, remember the enormous disappointment when, during the three-channel 1970s, some science-fiction epic or raunchy inner-city drama failed to come the way of “viewers in Northern Ireland” because the people of Ulster insisted on watching f**cking motor f**king sports all the f**king day long. “And now, in place of coverage of our Lord’s second coming, we have go-kart racing from Downpatrick.” If it wasn’t f**king motor f**king sports it was the feeble comic stylings of some witless cretin who would barely get a job cleaning the lavatories in an English — or even Welsh — television station.”How’s about ye! See yer wee woman from the Shankill? Maisie ye call her. Gawd she’d make ye want to boke.” Shut up! Why  do you think being Northern Irish is funny in itself? Do a joke!

  In short, we ached for the likes of Andy Stewart.

  Some excellent television programmes have, of course, come from Northern Ireland. Indeed, you could argue — with absolute sincerity — that BBC Northern Ireland and UTV together delivered the most cutting dramas, the most incisive current affairs programmes and the most thrilling action shows of the last hundred years. Like Fermat when announcing his proof, I do not have space to list the evidence here, but I will do so in a future post. You can count on that, readers.

  I do, however, have a teeny, tiny issue with Northern Irish comedy programmes. Ms McFetridge is on my television as we speak and the grey pall of non-humour emerging from the device is so thick and fetid that I can barely breathe. What year is it? Is there anywhere else in the world where such a singularly awful drag act could find work? Surely, even the comedy troupes of Turkmenistan have got beyond this now.

  The tribunes of Northern Irish TV comedy remain, of course, the team behind the jaw-droppingly extraordinary Give My Head Peace.  This ghastly sit-com, now happily deceased, offered a terrifying practical demonstration of the delusions that define the province’s unlovely comedy culture.

  1. Being Northern Irish is, in itself, funny.
  Saying “’bout ye” or  “Ulster fry”stands as a joke.

  2. Simply mentioning any well-known local politician deserves a laugh.
  Whatever the set up, “Alex Maskey” will work as a punchline.

  3. High culture of any sort is also inherently hilarious.
  Ballet or “modern art” will always raise a laugh.

  4. The English wear bowler hats and say “jolly good” all the time.
  “Oh, I say! What do you mean, Uncle Andrew?”

  5. Americans wear cowboy hats and say “howdy” all the time.
  “This here little country ain’t big enough to park ma Cadeeelac in. Yee ha!”

  6. Being Northern Irish is, in itself, funny.
  Yeah, I know we said this before, but it really does explain all you need to know about this horrific, horrific movement.

  Oh, and, since you ask, I was raised in South Belfast.

• The Pet Shop Boys are better than the Pogues.

  November 24, 2009 @ 11:17 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Have I got your attention? I’m fairly sure I believe this. I’m less sure I believe that the Shoppies version of Always on My Mind is better than the Pogues’ Fairy Tale of New York, but, nonetheless, it is a repeated unfavourable comparison of the former to the latter that drives this particular rant.

  

  Look how authentic I am. Burp!

  ‘Tis the season to be jolly. ‘Tis the season to kick Tiny Tim into the gutter. ‘Tis the season to hear deejays drag out the same faux-outrage at an “injustice” that — if the record spinners are to be believed — compares only with the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus in its enormity.

  “Well, that was Fairytale of New York, pop pickers,” Mick McTastic smarms. “What a marv-tabulous tune. And do you know that it never got to number one? It was beaten to that spot by The Pet Shop Boys’ version of Always on My Mind. What kind of universe do we live in?” Italics don’t really do justice to the level of scorn McTastic manoeuvres into his pronunciation of the synth-duo’s name. I was standing in a shop yesterday and I heard some soup-brained mooncalf say these very words — well not these very words — after playing the Pogues’ Christmas hit for the first time of the year. After some consideration, I decided to write this post rather than go round to the idiot’s house and batter him to death with cudgels fashioned from the limbs of his slain family.

  The implication — often made explicit — is not just that The Pogues must be regarded a better band than the Pet Shop Boys. More significantly, the Anglo-Irish tea-tray head-butters are, it is suggested, more authentic than the dry, ascetic, Christopher Isherwood-reading ironists.

  Now, insofar as I have any worthwhile point to make here, here it is: I loathe authenticity in pop. For a start, there isn’t really any such thing. When Bruce Springsteen, a millionaire rock star who rarely travels by bus, pulls on a plaid shirt and sings about losing his job down at the refinery, he is being no more “authentic” than Westlife are when they dress up in nice suits and sing about being in lurve. In fact, Bruce is, if anything, being less authentic than the boy band. They probably are in love. He hasn’t clocked in at the refinery since Richard Nixon was president.

  When it comes down to a battle of the pure and authentic versus the mannered and the eccentric, I will tend towards the latter every time. I take Kraftwerk over The E-Street Band.  I take The Human League over Dire Straits. I take David Bowie over Neil Young. I take Can over The Scorpions. I take The Fall over The Jam (actually, I take The Fall over everybody, but that’s a different argument). And I take The Pet Shop boys over The Pogues. To an extent this is because the Shoppies don’t pretend that, even when occupying the upper reaches of the charts, they live in a caravan by the dirtiest bend in the filthiest canal. But it is also, surprisingly, because I think they write better songs.  Here’s one of the very best. Just to justify its place in this “blog”, we should point out that the video is by the late, great Derek Jarman.

  

• I just want to start a debate…

  November 4, 2009 @ 7:02 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Look, I just wanted to start a debate about the Sudetenland.

  I just want to start a debate about the disingenuous use of the phrase “I just want to start a debate”. I don’t know when this happened, but, at some point in the last half-decade, those seven words came to be used as the standard get-out clause for anybody who didn’t have the guts to unambiguously express their supposedly controversial views.  You know how it goes. “Now look, Pat. When I said I supported the mass castration of all short people I was just trying to start a debate on the superabundance of non-enormous citizens.” That sort of thing.

  I was reminded of this last month while watching Bill Maher (who I generally like, incidentally) talking paranoid, pseudo-scientific garbage about the dangers of vaccination. The variation on the dread phrase appears around 0:25.

  

  That’s not what you’re saying Bill. Or, rather, that’s not all you’re saying. You are saying, like notorious horse-frightener Dr Andrew Wakefield, that vaccinations are substantially more dangerous than the conditions they ward against. Now, we don’t have space to rubbish this nonsense in Screenwriter and that’s not the purpose of this particular post, anyway. (Mind you, it is interesting to note that, of all people, Bill, who has so vigorously ridiculed the 9/11 truther fruitcakes, has climbed aboard this particular charabanc.) My point is simply this: say what you mean and stop pretending you’re just running a metaphorical flag up a virtual pole.

  Jack Straw, the British Justice minister, recently said something similar while revisiting his much-discussed comments detailing how he preferred female Muslim constituents to remove their veils when visiting his surgery. Again he was “just trying to start a debate”. No you weren’t, Jack. You were lodging an indirect objection to a practice you find troubling. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just say what you bleeding mean, matey.